we who are about to die
by Fialleril
Summary: salute you. (Every night he names himself. Shiro. And every day the crowd screams his name in a voice like blood. Champion.)


Notes:

Because the Galra Empire is basically Space Rome and I have to use my classics degree for _something_.

Also because I have yet to see a fic referencing the movie Gladiator and I am frankly disappointed in this fandom. Are you not entertained?

So have some gladiator Shiro fic, and a closer look at his Galra arm. (We see him break the Galra's remote control over the arm in the first episode, but that's not something you just do. To me that says, whether he consciously remembers it or not, Shiro's been slowly weakening his chains for quite a while, and we get to see them finally snap in that moment. In this fic, we see some of the weakening that will eventually lead to the snap.)

 **Warnings for:** slavery, forced combat, torture, harm to children, harm to animals, non-consensual amputation, body horror, medical torture, blood, dissociation, suicide mention

 _Nos morituri te salutamus_ : (Latin) We who are about to die salute you.

* * *

 **we who are about to die**

The first time it happens, Shiro hardly notices.

The guards have surrounded him, jostling and hemming him in, and there are hands on his arms and cruel laughter in his ears and he realizes, in a half-registered glimpse from the corners of his vision, that for the first time they look almost nervous. They haven't tried to take the sword from him. The sword still red with Matt's blood.

Matt is staring back at him, small and frightened and desperate, and growing further and further away. Shiro doesn't know where they'll take him. He doesn't know what a work camp will mean, or if he'll even be taken to the same one as his father.

He can't think too much about that. Wherever they're taking Matt, it will be better than this. He has to believe that.

The dull roar of the crowd swells with a sudden fury, and Shiro jumps, his hand tightening around the sword, eyes skittering about the arena, seeing and not seeing. There's too much. He can't focus. The only face he can see clearly is Matt's, small now, so small and still terrified, and then there is a clang and the door they were dragged through is closed and Shiro is alone.

Something growls in his ear. "You want blood, slave? What are you waiting for?" And he's shoved forward, out into the arena.

The crowd rises in a tide of rage and swallows him, screaming, chanting in a language he can't understand. All he hears is the roar.

There's some enormous creature crouched on the other side of the arena, head bowed, and it's screaming too. Shiro is pushed to his knees, and the guards on either side of him take up the chant. It pounds in his head and pulses in his veins, and he thinks he might be sick.

Then his guards step back, and a deathly silence falls, and Shiro looks up and sees the creature barreling towards him. And now there is no time to be sick, no time to speak, no time to think of Matt or Commander Holt or anyone else. He only wants to live.

* * *

He wins his first battle, and the next, and the next after that. The roar of the crowd becomes familiar. The faces of his fellow prisoners become familiar, and then disappear and are replaced by new faces that he learns just in time for them, too, to disappear. The crowds have a new chant when he's brought out now. It's not his name, because no one here knows his name. No one has ever asked. But he can tell it's a name they've given him. He wonders if he really wants to know what it means.

And before every fight, there's the chanting, and his opponent kneeling opposite him, and Shiro himself pushed to his knees, head bowed, while his guards join in the chant above him.

As he kneels before his sixth battle, he finds himself thinking, distantly, that it has the air of a ritual.

* * *

He doesn't know how long he's been here. Long enough that the howling of the crowd no longer startles him. Long enough that sometimes, he doesn't hear them at all. Long enough that he's starting to forget the taste of his mother's udon, the smell of the desert air outside the Garrison, the gentle rasp of his grandmother's singing.

Long enough that he's begun to learn the language.

Of course, they have some sort of translator technology. That much has been obvious from the beginning, from the first moment of terror above Kerberos. He doesn't know how it works, and he certainly can't ask. But it's only effective on direct speech. He can understand everything they say to him, and he can communicate in turn. When they let him.

It doesn't seem to work for anything more indirect, though. The shouts of the crowd in the arena, the chatter of the guards outside the cell, the private whisperings of other slaves. He can't understand any of that.

But he learns.

He's always been good with languages. It might be the only advantage he has here, he thinks, so he focuses his mind on that and tries not to think about…well. Tries not to think.

He listens to the Galra guards in their hushed conversations outside. When he can, he watches the movements of their mouths. He watches when they speak to him, when the movements don't match the words that he hears. Sometimes, when he's feeling daring (or just desperate), he asks the other prisoners. He learns.

He learns the language of the games.

* * *

The name they shout when he appears in the arena is Champion. Back in the kennel where he sleeps with the other prisoners, the names are different. They call him slave, and dog, and nothing at all. Sometimes, after a match he has won too quickly, or more often after he has refused to kill an opponent, the guards will kick at him and spit at him and four of them will hold him down while the fifth carves words into his skin in a twisting, knife-edged script he can't read.

He starts to fear that he will forget his own name, so he whispers it to himself sometimes, in the dark after all the locks have been engaged and the guards have left and the blood is drying in illegible letters on his skin. Shiro, he whispers to himself. His name is Takashi Shirogane. Shiro. Again and again.

Sometimes the others, his fellow slaves, tell him to be quiet, and then he only mouths the words to himself, his lips shaping the sounds silently, again and again. Shiro. Shiro. His name is Shiro.

Every night he names himself. Shiro. And every day the crowd screams his name in a voice like blood. Champion.

* * *

He knows what the ritual is now.

The arena is arranged almost like a stadium on Earth. A coliseum, he thinks once with a twist of his mouth that might be a smile. Bread and circuses. He's always been interested in history.

In the center of one long wall of the stadium there is a lavish spectators' box. Shiro's never seen anyone in it, but he knows, too, that there were…he can't guess how many fights, before he really became aware of his surroundings. Maybe there were times the box wasn't empty. He doesn't know.

All he knows is that it's this box the other gladiators kneel to, before the blood match begins.

Some of his opponents are fellow slaves, but most are massively built, scarred and vicious beings, thirsty for blood. They don't come from the slave pens. Professional gladiators, maybe. Or soldiers, perhaps, who have fallen from favor, and are willing to do anything to win it back.

Before every match, they kneel and face the empty box. They thump their chests, once, with closed fists. "For the glory of Zarkon!" they scream, and the crowd echoes it back, and Shiro's handlers push him to his knees and scream the words for him.

 _Nos morituri te salutamus_ , Shiro thinks, distantly, and he hears the words in the voice of his old classical history professor, Dr. Perez, and for a moment he's almost, absurdly, _grateful_. He can't remember the last time he thought of Earth.

And then the match begins, and there's no more time to think of anything.

* * *

He tries praying, sometimes. His grandmother's Shinto prayers, and his grandma's Catholic prayers, and a few scraps he learned once from a Wiccan roommate. He whispers the words aloud in the shadows of the cell just to hear them, a human voice speaking human words. He mumbles them to himself while the crowds scream in Galra for the glory of Zarkon.

They all mix together, words in Japanese and Portuguese and English, until he can't remember which is which, except that they're all his. His traditions, his languages. No one else here can understand his words. No one can take them away.

* * *

He's lost track of the number of times he's killed.

It's not something Shiro thinks about often. But the thought sits there, a shadow breathing at the bottom of the deep well of his mind. In his sleep, it comes crawling out, rasping and dragging its claws, and it sinks them into his skull and leaves poison behind.

He wasn't trained to be a soldier. He knows how to fight, of course – self-defense was mandatory at the Garrison. And he's always enjoyed keeping himself in shape. It's not at all the same.

Now he is a fighter. A killer. He doesn't know how many times. That makes it worse, he thinks. He can't even remember most of their faces. Even in his dreams, they are faceless.

Matt, he thinks once, is a slave too. But at least he will never have to know himself like this.

Shiro doesn't think of Matt or his father often.

* * *

His opponents are professional gladiators, or tortured, enraged animals, or robotic fighters, until, one day, they aren't.

He walks out into the arena (he can't remember when they stopped having to shove him, but there doesn't seem to be a point in fighting them, and he'd rather walk under his own power), and there across from him are three people. Two are tall and thin, and he can't tell if that's natural for their species or if it's the result of starvation. They're dressed like him. They came out of the slave pits. Food in the kennels is never plentiful, but it's better for winners.

His eyes move from the two tall figures to the last. The third is a child.

Shiro freezes.

He can hear the crowd chanting his name. Champion. He can hear, closer but almost drowned out by the crowd, the laughter of his guards. He can hear the crackle of a sound system, and a voice announcing the battle about to commence for the glory of Emperor Zarkon.

He's supposed to kneel. On the opposite side of the arena, he sees several guards forcing the three slaves to their knees. The child stumbles roughly and starts to cry. The guards prod at the two adults, and Shiro can see them trembling as their mouths open and, stuttering, they dedicate themselves to the glory of Zarkon.

The voice of his old professor echoes in his head. He doesn't know the name of the emotion choking his throat.

He stands.

A murmur of disquiet grows in the crowd. Shiro's guards shout at him, but he doesn't hear their words. His eyes are caught on the child's face. Young, he thinks. Younger than Matt. Younger than any of the students at the Garrison, even.

The butt of a laser rifle impacts against his shoulder, and he stumbles forward, catching himself with an awkward lunge. His shoulder blade throbs. He straightens again, and stands.

"On your knees for the glory of Zarkon!" he hears one of his guards growl.

"No," he hears himself say.

Hands shove at him, and Shiro lets himself drop – not to his knees, but into a low crouch. He spins around, kicking out, and two of his guards go down, their legs swept from beneath them. He's up again and laying out another when he hears the unmistakable sound of rifles cocked in readiness.

There are six of them. He has his sword, but that won't be enough. They could take him out now, at point blank range.

Shiro risks one glance over his shoulder, and sees the child. She's staring at him with huge round eyes, her antennae trembling. The two adults – her parents? – are looking at him with a gratitude that is barely distinguishable from terror.

For the first time, Shiro looks at his guards and thinks that it might not be so bad, to die.

They fire, and he experiences half a second of surprise when what emerges from the rifles is not a laser blast but something more akin to the bright, cracking arc of lightning. And then it strikes him, sparking through his bones and setting all his nerve endings on fire, and he drops at last to his knees, a scream tearing itself from his throat. _For the glory of Zarkon_ , he thinks, and the part of him that is far away, watching all of this, untouchable by pain, laughs.

* * *

They don't take him back to his cell.

The room they take him to is one he's never seen before, stark and sterile and harshly metallic, lit by eerie, diffused purple light that casts more shadows than brightness. There's a table in the center of the room, with straps dangling from the sides, and another, smaller table, its surface covered in needles and sharp-edged implements.

He jerks away from his guards, but they only laugh at him, and the lightning sings again and he's falling.

He blinks. They're strapping him to the table. He can't move his arms or his legs. He lashes his head from side to side, desperate, until they come and bind that, too.

"Be quiet, slave," one of the guards laughs, "or we'll gag you, too."

Shiro hadn't been aware that he was screaming.

"No," says a new voice, dry, creaking, a dead-thing voice like something out of his nightmares. "I want to hear him."

She comes up beside the table, on his right side, and he can see her face. A narrow face, sharp as a knife blade, with purple skin (but everything is purple in this light) and glowing eyes. She smiles like a slaughter house.

"Hello, Champion," she says. "I'm going to make you strong."

* * *

Shiro watches from somewhere else, somewhere outside himself. There's a curtain of purple between him and the world he knows, abstractly, is real. It doesn't feel real, though. He feels like he's watching a movie. It's strange; he hasn't thought about movies in a long time. He can't remember the last movie he saw. Did he even like thrillers, or horror films? He can't remember.

This is definitely a horror film, though. He thinks maybe he saw one like it once. He remembers thinking it was pretty unrealistic.

The woman is chanting something, blood and shadows dripping from her words to puddle on the floor and rise in a dark tide. He can feel it creeping up around him, lapping at his limbs, at his hair. Soon he will drown.

But his body can't move. Can't stand, can't swim through the black flood. He's aware of his limbs and his neck and the top of his head, strapped down against the table, but the awareness is clinical, detached. He can see it all happening. They're taking his arm. It hurts, he thinks. It must hurt. There's a lot of screaming.

It's like that movie. Yes, the movie. He can't remember what it was called, but he knows now that he didn't like it. A sudden flash of memory: he's thirteen, all gangly arms and legs and a desperate need to prove himself, and his friends are laughing at him because he doesn't like scary movies, and he can't find a way to tell them that he _isn't_ scared, really he's not, it's just that he hates seeing all the gore, and…

And he still hates it. Seeing the jagged bones and the torn edges of sinew and muscle, and all the pooling blood.

There's a lot of blood now. It covers the table, and his clothes, and the woman's long, jagged knife. It's gushing from the place his right arm used to be.

The screaming is a whimpering now. The woman, the witch, is still chanting something, and darkness circles with the motions of her hands. One of them comes to rest on his head, brushing almost tenderly over his brow. He watches her hand as it smooths his white hair – and that's not right, is it? He doesn't have white hair, he –

He doesn't, of course. The blood on her hand is already staining it dark again.

"Where have you gone, Champion?" he hears her cackle. "Who said you could leave?" And then her hand tightens in his hair and she _yanks_ , and he's pulled back down into the body on the table and the screaming that's coming from his throat and the raw broken edge where his arm used to be.

* * *

He wakes up. It's later, or earlier, or…he doesn't know. It's quiet. The air smells like blood and piss. Normal.

He's alone. That's not normal.

He tries to sit up, still groggy, and his body screams at him. There's a wrenching, seizing pain in his right arm, and he grabs at it, but his hand slips, sliding over smooth metal. He blinks, and looks down.

His right arm is made of metal.

He raises it, and muscles that aren't there anymore tighten and burn. He wiggles his fingers, one at a time and then all at once, and the metal joints move with the phantom feel of the hand that isn't there. He makes a fist. He flattens the palm.

He slams the metal hand into the wall, but the only pain he feels is in his bicep, a cutting pain like knives. They're taking his arm.

He can feel himself hyperventilating. Deep breaths, he thinks, the way he was taught in the Garrison. Slow, deep breaths. In and out. In and out. Shiro. His name is Shiro.

There's the sound of a lock disengaging, and then his cell door slides open. Blinding light floods in.

The guards grin at him. He's learned to recognize the different shapes of their grins. These are eager, anticipatory, and full of blood.

"On your feet, Champion," the first one says. He says the name in exactly the same way he usually says "slave."

Shiro's learned a long time ago that there's not much point in fighting them. He staggers to his feet.

"Time to test the experiment," one of them laughs, and Shiro looks down at the metal arm attached to his body and wonders what they've made of him.

* * *

The arena looks no different than it ever does, with one exception. This time, the box that the gladiators always bow to isn't empty.

It's far away, up in the stands, and he can't really see who's inside. Or he wouldn't be able to, if the face didn't fill all the screens in the arena.

He recognizes the face. It's the first Galra face he saw, really, looming out of a massive screen on an alien ship above the moon Kerberos. He was kneeling then, too, Shiro thinks. Always kneeling. For the glory of Zarkon. Nos morituri te salutamus.

The gate at the other end of the arena opens, and Shiro thinks he's been here before. The two older aliens, even thinner now, so it must be starvation. And the child. She looks terrified.

They're all pushed to their knees. For the glory of Zarkon. Shiro is pushed down, too, and this time he's too distant, too caught in time and repetition to resist them. He kneels, too. For the glory of Zarkon.

The match begins. He watches the two adults as they move to stand in front of the child, arms spread, protective. He thinks of Matt, staring up at him in terror and the last shreds of a big brother hero worship.

He stays on his knees.

There's a murmur of disappointment in the crowd, quickly swelling to rage. They're booing him, or the Galra equivalent anyway, and Shiro's control is thin, or maybe nonexistent. He laughs.

This is a movie too, isn't it? This is the part where he stands up, holds out his arms to the crowd, and screams, "Are you not entertained?"

Why does he keep thinking about movies?

"On your feet!" the same guard snarls, and Shiro ignores him, stays on his knees. He can stay here all day, he thinks. They want him to kneel. All right. He will.

But the metal arm drags him to his feet. He stares at it, uncomprehending. And then it lunges, the palm flattening like a blade, the hand glowing a sickly purple. It charges across the arena and drags him after it.

He has an instant, only the barest instant, to lock eyes with the three slaves. "Run!" he screams at them, and when they do, the metal arm follows, and Shiro follows after it, gasping and terrified.

He can't stop it. He can't control it. He can't –

One of the slaves has run off alone. A distraction, Shiro thinks. Something to draw his attention, to keep him away from the child, as long as possible.

He grabs the metal arm in his left hand, his only hand, and tries to hold it back. Tries to stop himself. He might as well have tried to hold back gravity.

The other slave swerves at the last minute around a pillar, and Shiro sees his chance. It takes all his strength not to turn. But he manages it, and the metal hand crushes into the pillar –

And slices through it like butter.

Shiro stares down at the hand, glowing purple, as the column crashes down. The stone isn't even hollow. It's solid all the way through, at least four feet thick of something the consistency of marble. The hand doesn't even hurt.

He understands now why they haven't given him a weapon this time. He _is_ a weapon.

And then the Galra hand is lunging again after its victim, and Shiro hears his own voice – a memory? a spoken reality? – shouting, "I want blood!" The slave – the other slave – turns, stops running. He's looking at Shiro with the kind of calm terror Shiro's become all too familiar with, the kind that says he doesn't want to die, but he knows it's inevitable, and he's done fighting it.

And Shiro is going to be the instrument of that.

"I'm sorry," he gasps out as the glowing hand bears down. "I don't – I can't – "

The other slave cringes back, saving himself for a few seconds more, and Shiro hears a whispered, ragged, "I know. I – I don't blame – "

The hand lunges again. Shiro tries to drag himself back, and gains maybe a foot, but his whole body is burning now and he can't – he can't –

The Galra arm wants blood. So what if it speaks in his voice? It wants blood.

It doesn't seem to be picky about whose.

It's a desperate idea, foolish, impossible. Suicidal, in the strictest definition of the word. But that's all right. Shiro realized a long time ago now that death might not be so bad. Better, infinitely better, than this, than being made into a weapon.

 _All right_ , he thinks at the arm, _all right. I'll give you blood._

A fierce, dark joy floods through him, and he doesn't know whose it is, because it's not his. It's _not_.

Or perhaps it is, and he's just…ready. Ready to be done. He's so tired of being afraid.

The hand stills, hanging motionless in the air, waiting. For the first time, Shiro knows that the arm is under his control. He's promised it blood.

He swings the metal hand, glowing and sword-edged, at his own neck.

It stops a hair's breadth from his jugular.

From the corner of his eye, he can see the deadly purple glow fade. The arm is frozen, out of his control again. It hangs like a dead weight, close, so close to his neck, but too far away.

He's not even allowed to die.

In the stands there's a breathless silence. Even the announcer's voice has gone still. Shiro risks a glance up, toward the nearest of the massive screens and Zarkon's face.

A slow smile creeps across the emperor's jagged lips. "Champion, indeed." The voice is a deep rumble, and it might even be a murmur, but the arena's sound systems make everything seem booming and immense. A shiver seems to run through the crowd. It might be fear, or it might be an almost religious awe. Shiro can't tell from here, but he has a terrible feeling it's the latter.

"You show promise, Champion," Zarkon says. "My druids chose well."

And that's…that's not good. It can't be. But there's something there, underneath the absolute, unquestionable authority in Zarkon's voice. Something almost…startled.

Perhaps, Shiro thinks, he's managed to surprise the Galra emperor. He doubts that will prove a good thing.

But now the guards are coming back into the arena, coming to collect him and the other three slaves. He sees the child clinging to one of the others, crying softly, and then the guards have surrounded them and they're all being dragged away. "It's the work camps for you now," he hears one of them say, snarling, laughing.

The surge of desperate relief that washes through Shiro leaves him weak and boneless and he nearly collapses when the guards close iron-hard hands around his upper arms. One of them wraps around his right bicep, just at the place where metal meets flesh, and then Shiro is screaming and falling and then he's flying, out of himself, out of the arena, out from under Zarkon's terrible eyes, flying – away.

* * *

The next fight is against some kind of massive, enraged beast, all tusks and bristling hair and blood-soaked eyes. He knows, from the moment they open the gate, that he's going to have to kill it.

The Galra hand glows at his side. They haven't given him a weapon. He _is_ a weapon.

He sinks the metal hand deep into the creature's head. It spasms around him in its death throes, and Shiro closes his eyes and murmurs the words to himself, Japanese and Portuguese and English mixing together, his words, _his_ , even if in this moment he hardly even knows what they mean.

* * *

He thinks it should feel different, killing with the metal arm. But…it doesn't. Not really.

Before, they usually gave him a sword, or sometimes an axe. Now his arm _is_ a sword, is an axe, is a burning brand of fire.

He can control it now. Well. In the arena, at least, he can control it. So long as he's using it to fight, the arm is his. It moves not too differently from his left arm, with only the faintest of whirring sounds, and it responds instantly to the signals his brain sends, just like the other.

Back in the kennels, things are different.

There's some kind of lock in the arm, he thinks. Something they can access remotely. They can turn him off and on again, like a robot. He tries not to think about how terrifying that is.

In the kennels, the arm is a dead weight. He can't move it at all. He has just enough of his own shoulder left that, when the guards come for him to hold him down and carve new words into his skin, he can swing the metal like a club. It doesn't do much good, but it leaves some bruises on them, at least. It means he tried to fight. And that's…that's important. It is.

Even when they do…something, something that makes the arm spark and scream at him, something that fills his bones with a fire far worse than the lightning of their stun rifles, that makes him drop to his knees and clutch at the arm until his fingers sear and his mind goes blank and then they can carve anything they please into his skin and he won't even feel it. Sometimes he doesn't even know it happens, not until he wakes to the feel of dried blood and a distant, tingling, full-body ache.

But in the arena, the metal arm is the perfect weapon. It's unstoppable, as far as he can tell. Unstoppable by anything except their remote commands.

And they want him to kill with it.

Most of the time, he does. But then, most of his opponents lately have been rabid beasts, animals tortured and starved and made vicious for the arena, and killing is the only mercy he can offer them. So he does.

They know he'll resist, if they give him a person to fight.

Shiro is aware that he's being…trained. Conditioned. That eventually it won't be just animals, but maybe, by then, he won't be able to tell the difference anyway.

But he also knows that he has a fallback option. They clearly want him alive, and he can use that. Every time he turns the glowing hand on his own throat, it feels infinitesimally easier. Whatever remote power the Galra have over his metal arm, he can resist it, just a little.

Just enough.

* * *

He loses track of how many battles pass. It's always hard to tell: he doesn't know how long a day is on this planet, or even if he _is_ on a planet. Maybe he's still on a ship, or in some kind of space station. There's no way to tell. The slave pits are under the arena, and the arena is fully enclosed. He hasn't been anywhere else since he was brought here. He wonders what the sky looks like, outside the arena. He wonders if there is a sky.

The crowd is roaring again, roaring with a single voice punctuated with the sound of clapping hands and pounding feet. Shiro looks up and sees that the Imperial box is occupied. Zarkon's face, projected across countless screens, fills his vision. Silence falls.

Today is a gladiator day. The Champion versus the Annihilator. The name should be ridiculous. It is ridiculous, in spite of everything. Shiro lets himself laugh, because he can. Because he hasn't forgotten how. Not yet.

On the other side of the arena, the Annihilator drops to his knees. He beats his chest. He screams out, "For the glory of Zarkon!"

The silence falls again. Shiro can feel a hundred thousand eyes on him.

He bites his tongue. He straightens his back. He plants his feet and stands.

He raises the metal right hand to his throat and says nothing at all.


End file.
